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Liberated by Design Constraints

As our team has worked through design decisions, it has sometimes felt limiting to have so many choices: what cool things should we do, what color combinations should we use, what emotion might we evoke? Should we follow current design trends and use a large image? Or what about video? The sky seems to be the limit.

Thankfully, we have page load times to reel us in!

Because every cool thing we put onto our site adds additional weight to the page. Sure, it’ll look great to us here in town, with our newer phones and fast connections. But for the person with a less optimal situation, it can be a long wait.

Current thinking is that a page should load above the fold in about one second, but three seconds is okay. Pity the poor person in a rural area who is waiting and waiting while a heavy page loads.

Web designers and programmers bear a responsibility to deliver a site that is accessible to all, particularly when the site’s purpose is health education, or if it’s associated with an intervention study.

And, not only will your potential users get tired of waiting for the bells and whistles to download, but a long load time will also affect its SEO.